In the case of the United States -- which has been indisputably the
reigning global superpower for six decades -- there are signs -- ranging
from the tumult in the Middle East to a humiliating war in Afghanistan
to a downgrade of US sovereign debt -- that America is at a key
inflection point in its history and that the US network of global
control (aka, "empire") is disintegrating.

When the Berlin Wall fell in the summer of 1989, most of the world saw it as a crack so deep and fundamental in the superstructure of the Soviet Union that doubts about the USSR's solvency as a global power abounded.

In nature, when a piece of ice larger than Rhode Island breaks off of Antarctica, one sees tangibly the very different world that global warming is shaping. In the case of the United States -- which has been indisputably the reigning global superpower for six decades -- there are signs -- ranging from the tumult in the Middle East to a humiliating war in Afghanistan to a downgrade of US sovereign debt -- that America is at a key inflection point in its history and that the US network of global control (aka, "empire") is disintegrating.

Chalmers Johnson, a scholar who authored Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
before 9/11, argued in the 1990s that the US had become blind to the
global push-back to American dictates. With the USSR gone and China
the fastest growing market economy, the moniker of "leader of the free
world" carried with it diminishing privileges and power.

Without the Soviet menace threatening the global order, the cost-benefit
relationship between other nations and the US fundamentally changed.
Other countries were no longer willing to pay the same political price
to the US for protection that they once did, a price paid in terms of
following American leadership in global institutions, respecting and
relying on the US dollar as the global reserve currency, following trade
and economic policies that were largely crafted by America's financial
elite, and accepting the reality of the Pentagon's global sprawl.

The world today sees a diminished America -- one whose military power
seems over-extended and hemorrhaging in Afghanistan; whose economic
leadership was in doubt when the US exported toxic financial products to
the world through the sub-prime crisis and which now is officially
crippled given the first ratings downgrade of American bonds; whose
moral leadership remains tied in knots as long as Guantanamo remains
open and the self-confidence Americans once had in their own systems of
justice and government continues to decline.

It's through this lens that the hopeful-sounding Arab Spring, the riots
in London, the tumultuous financial markets, and the rise of China and a
new crop of ascending powers like Brazil, India, Turkey, and South
Africa need to be considered. The old order is crumbling; a new one is
forming -- but between them is chaos, uncertainty and social and
political friction.

When a frustrated, educated fruit peddler in Tunisia decided to end his
life -- challenging his government for its corruption and ineptitude and
setting himself on fire to demand dignity and respect, a spark was set
in the minds of people throughout the Middle East who decided they were
finished with governments that humiliated, harassed, and arbitrarily
imprisoned, tortured, killed and abused their own citizens.

The scenes of millions of people rising up in Egypt, in Tahrir Square in
Cairo, and topping the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak shocked
everyone -- powerful and powerless alike. The equation of power changed.
While the protesters and democracy activists deserve the great majority
of credit for change -- part of the equation of Mubarak's downfall has to
include the more humbled circumstances of the United States.

America didn't forego its ally Mubarak and its interests in Egypt
because of a moral decision to support what could have been fantasies of
democracy and freedom of people in the streets, America had less
ability than it had decades ago to control the temperature of affairs
inside countries.
Mubarak's reign had become too expensive for the US -- not financially,
but politically -- in a world that increasingly doubted America's ability
to achieve its objectives, to deliver on the values it often talked
about.

President Obama and his White House National Security Council team said
that in the case of Egypt, there was a "great opportunity to align
values and interests." The real answer is that "interests" were
recalculated because the US commitments are overextended and the
mystique of American power was now being challenged by thousands of
pin-prick tests around the world.

The decision by President Obama to join Great Britain and France in a
humanitarian intervention in Libya exhibits the trap into which a
diminished superpower with the memory of a globally dominant ego used to
large ambitions can fall .
Before the intervention, the US Department of Defense warned Obama that a
"limited conflict" was dangerous -- that the resources for a larger
conflict were not easily available and that a limited approach could
lead to a long-term, costly stalemate with Moammer Qaddafi; and that
even if the NATO intervention succeeded in destabilizing the Libyan
dictator, the successor government could easily be ripped apart by
internal tensions and either tribal or political/religious civil war.

America's resource constraints -- as well as the limited military and
financial capacities of US allies in Europe -- have produced a
half-effort in Libya yielding exactly the stalemate thus far, that many
national security experts feared. And with this stalemate, the US
action -- which in the eyes of the world is a "defining action" -- creates
a benchmark of US power and prestige that appears impotent.

The Assad regime in Syria is engaged in full-scale, random assaults
throughout the country on its own people -- detaining many thousands and
wounding and killing many unarmed protesters and innocent, non-political
bystanders. And yet the US and the West have virtually no influence on
the internal dynamics at play in Syria. The Gulf Cooperation Council
is issuing statements of concern -- but taking no serious action. The
Arab League has said nothing. China and Russia -- while concerned about
what is happening in Syria and encouraging "restraint" -- are not
allowing the US to proceed with any UN Security Council measures.

The world is paralyzed trying to respond to the horrific violence inside
Syria, thus exposing the weakness of the United States in shaping
Syria's incentives and disincentives in the world. The US has little with which to
bribe, or seduce, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- and little with which to compel him.

In the eyes of the Arab region, if Obama cannot prevail over the Israeli
Prime Minister in hard fought political differences -- as over the
continued expansion of Israeli settlements -- then to many of these
leaders, Obama's power looks paper thin and ignorable.

This is a tough spot for the United States to be in as it means that every challenge is harder, every burden heavier.

Power,
like an equity in the stock markets, is ultimately a function of future
expectations -- and today the reality is that America's stock has
fallen dramatically and will only rise again with visionary statecraft
revolutionary, new global deal-making that might restore the impression
that America once again matters.Image is from Waving Goodbye to Hegemony by Parag Khanna in the New York Times Magazine. Image by Kevin Van Aeist.Reprinted with permission.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.